Cool Repentance by Antonia Fraser Read Free Book Online Page B

had added quickly: 'Except in the line of duty, that is.'
    Was this new improved version of the Larminster Festival quite what Cy Fredericks had in mind as the significantly insignificant? At the same time Jemima was uneasily aware that Cy Fredericks was hardly going to back out from televising the return of Christabel Herrick to the stage; something to which it would appear that he had inadvertently secured the exclusive rights. Under the circumstances she hardly thought that Cy would stick by his original notion of decent cultural obscurity. Her instinct told her that her own programme was due to undergo roughly the same transformation as the Larminster Festival itself in the immediate future.
    And so indeed it proved. Over the next few days Cy Fredericks abandoned the whole concept of the insignificant festival with suspicious alacrity. Larminster and its Festival now became infinitely more central in the whole Fredericks scheme of things and that in turn reflected on the lives of all those concerned with the original programme.
    Guthrie Carlyle, swearing outwardly over the damage to schedules, comforted himself inwardly with dreams of prime-time television. Cherry took the opportunity to end - most regretfully - a romance with a craggy forty-year-old producer in another department on the grounds of pressure of work; her secret dreams were of Julian Cartwright's handsomely greying head on her pillow in some Larminster hostelry while Christabel busied herself with her career. Even Spike Thompson, saturnine as ever in his legendary battered black leather jacket, with looks which made his claim to descend from a family of Italian ice - cream manufacturers named Tommaso at least plausible, spared time from the possible financial implications of such a change to murmur: 'Christabel Herrick, she looks pretty good in her photographs and some of these older women are fantastic.' 
    'Christabel Herrick, isn't she absolutely into younger men?' enquired a passing secretary innocently. 'I mean, didn't she run off with a randy teenager?'
    'Yes, Spike, you'd better keep an eye on your Focus Puller,' concurred Guthrie in a bland voice which was not at all innocent; leaving the secretary to wonder why the great - and greatly fancied - Spike Thompson gave her a wide berth in the Megalith canteen thereafter, despite a series of very straightforward propositions made there on previous occasions.
    Jemima Shore for her part found herself with two new tasks. The first was to get to know Christabel Herrick, the distinguished actress who had dominated a generation before abandoning the stage, through the medium of the Megalith cuttings library. The second was to get to know Christabel Cartwright, the lady of Lark Manor, in person.
    She was half-way through the first task, when she was interrupted by a telephone call from the object of her researches. Already Jemima had become torn between morbid curiosity and personal disgust as sensational headline followed headline. Listening to Christabel Cartwright's delightful low voice on the telephone, she found it very difficult to equate the two images.
    Christabel's call fortuitously set the second task under way, for she had rung up to propose lunch together. She suggested Larminster - Flora's Kitchen - rather than her own house on the rather vaguely expressed grounds that 'there's so much always going on at Lark'.
    A few days later at the restaurant Christabel was more explicit: 'We're redesigning the courtyard garden to make it less doleful, there are no flowers there in the summer, except climbers, which is ridiculous, lots and lots of peonies I thought, Julian says they take years to establish, but I said, we've got years darling, years and years, at least speaking for myself.. .'
    Yes, thought Jemima, it was certainly very difficult to reconcile the romantic heroine - or villainess - of the newspaper with this pleasant pretty well-dressed woman sitting opposite her, rattling on about her garden